The Sudden Arrival of Violence

By: Malcolm Mackay

Narrated by: Angus King

The stunning conclusion to the Glasgow Trilogy from the celebrated author of The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter and How a Gunman Says Goodbye.

He's touching the front of his coat, feeling the shape of the gun. Should have got rid of it. On any other night, any other job, he would. This isn't any other job. This, he intends, will be his last...

It begins with two deaths: A money-man and a grass. Deaths that offer a unique opportunity to a man like Calum MacLean. A man who has finally had enough of killing. Meanwhile two of Glasgow's biggest criminal organisations are at quiet, deadly war with one another. And as Detective Michael Fisher knows, the biggest - and bloodiest - manoeuvres are yet to come...

The stunning conclusion to Malcolm Mackay's lauded Glasgow Trilogy, The Sudden Arrival of Violence will return listeners to the city's underworld: A place of dark motives, dangerous allegiances and inescapable violence...

©2014 Malcolm Mackay (P)2013 Pan Macmillan Publishers Ltd

Critic reviews

"Two superb trilogies reach finality. The Sudden Arrival of Violence follows the young hitman quasi-hero Calum MacLean as he attempts to quit his lethal occupation and disappear. The Byzantine intricacies of Glasgow’s gangster community obstruct his plans. Much blood flows; betrayals and double crosses multiply. Mackay is a true original, managing to conjure up a gripping new way of portraying city-noir. This, from a writer who has lived his whole life in far-off Stornoway, with only few short visits to the Glasgow he has so vividly created. He’s no longer a rising star. He’s risen." ( The Times)
"His clipped, spare, present tense narrative is urgent, clever and ominous. In a field so crowded as crime writing it is not easy to present an original voice. Malcolm Mackay’s laconic tone is his alone…the Herbrides have produced an author of their own who strides easily into the top division" (West Highland Free Press)

"Not many crime writers can claim to have created a truly original style. Mackay has done so in his Glasgow Trilogy (of which this is the last), a feat all the more remarkable for a native of Stornoway who has rarely visited the big city…The plot’s good, but what grabs even more is his unique way of telling it." ( The Times)